There is probably nobody left in SA who argues that state institutions are working well. But why they are working badly is a more contentious question. Here’s an answer that is not so popular, mainly because it is inconvenient, but it is no less true for that.
Twenty-three years ago, Thabo Mbeki complained that SA was a country of two nations, one relatively prosperous, the other black and poor. How best to go about measuring whether he was right?
One way is to ask whether we access the same public services — whether we use the same healthcare system when sick, whether our children go to the same schools, whether we go to the same armed personnel when we are in danger.
By this measure, we are more sharply cleaved into two than when Mbeki made his speech. About 9-million South Africans are members of private medical schemes, while the rest rely on failing public healthcare. About a third of children go to fee-paying schools; the remainder are chained to poor education. I am not sure how many South Africans pay for private security, but it is fair to guess that if you live in the suburbs, the first port of call when you are in danger is an agency you have paid. In the townships you are unlikely to be so lucky.
Never before in SA history has the situation been quite this stark. Under apartheid, all but a tiny proportion of white people used public services. The vast majority sent their children to free state schools. When they were threatened, suburbanites called the police. Medicine was more complicated; the well-off opted for a mix of state and private care.
Public services stop working when the middle classes abandon them. However much money you throw at them, however much thought you invest in them: it is never enough. This is not a rhetorical complaint or a call for class suicide. It is just a cold fact, one that has been known for decades.
The point was made most powerfully 51 years ago by Albert Hirschman, the greatest development economist of the 20th century, in his book, Exit, Voice and Loyalty.
How does a declining organisation turn around, Hirschman asks. Broadly, there are two ways. First, its members exercise “voice”: they fight for better services, either because they are loyal or because they have nowhere else to go. Alternatively, members leave. Hirschman calls this “exit”. The institution will either win them back or die.
But this is not always true, Hirschman continues. There are cases when the sudden availability of exit neither improves nor kills a bad institution; it just gets worse. This happens when a public service used by the poor and well-off alike is opened to competition. “There are ... cases,” Hirschman writes, “where competition does not restrain monopoly as it is supposed to, but comforts and bolsters it by unburdening it of its more troublesome customers.” What emerges, he argues, is a “monopoly-tyranny ... an oppression of the weak by the incompetent and an exploitation of the poor by the lazy...”
That is precisely what has happened in SA. When the middle classes, black and white, abandoned public services, they were, although they didn’t know it, putting the writing on the wall.
The consequences are severe, not just for the poor but for both of Mbeki’s two nations. An economy that fails to educate two-thirds of its children properly does not grow. A failing police service starts turning to crime itself.
I am not advocating that readers of this newspaper enrol their children at township schools, nor that everyone abandons private security and calls the police. That would be pretty dumb.
But if ever there was an urgent project for a social compact to perform, it is to arrest the cleaving of SA into two nations. It would be formidably hard, perhaps well-nigh impossible, but the forging of a society-wide alliance to invite the middle classes into public services is an existential task.
• Steinberg is a research associate at Oxford University’s African Studies Centre
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